Slashdot Mirror
Vast Nazi Facility Uncovered In Austria; Purported A-Bomb Development Site
schwit1 (797399) writes "Suspiciously high radiation levels around the Austrian town of St. Georgen an der Gusen had long fueled theories that there was a buried bunker nearby where Nazis had tested nuclear weapons during WWII. Those suspicions came one step closer to being confirmed last week after the opening of a 75-acre underground complex was dug out from below the earth and granite used to seal off the entrance, the Times of Israel reports. The excavation team was led by Austrian filmmaker Andreas Sulzer, who says the site was "likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich" — a facility that probably relied on forced labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and may have even been the testing location for a nuclear bomb, the Daily Mirror reports. The weapons facility was believed to have been manned by SS General Hans Kammler and situated near the B8 Bergkristall factory, where the first working jet-powered fighter was created, International Business Times reports; Sulzer first got wind of the site after seeing references to it in an Austrian physicist's diary.
The Washington Post cautions that while "the full scope of what occurred inside those reported chambers in the Austrian town of St. Georgen remains unclear and Sulzer’s conclusions are speculative, some analysts are already trumpeting the findings. ... The reported findings, if corroborated by further inquiry, could add fresh fodder to an ongoing debate over the Third Reich’s ultimately failed attempt to secure an atomic weapon."
And St. Georgen-an-der-Gusen is about a good hour's drive away. I'll certainly visit the place once it is opened up for the public. It is quite amazing what lengths the Nazis went to in order to shelter their weapons production from Allied bombing. Just outside the town I now live in, the Nazis dug out an existing cave complex, which had been a gypsum mine up to WO II, until the volume was large enough to facilitate a complete HE162 jet fighter production line.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Look it now. Merkel pretty much controls Europe -
Look at Angela Merkel now . . . she has Ph.D. in Physics, and a bad bowl-head haircut to boot! A German TV camera team caught her last year buying a jar of mustard in a supermarket in Berlin. The team was filming an advertisement, until one of the crew said. Hey, isn't that the Channcellor or something?"
When was the last time you saw President Obama anywhere, without a half Marine Brigade protecting him . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
While I lived at RAF Gatow, Berlin (dad was in the RAF) during the 1980s, we used to play a heck of a lot in the extensive woods on base - we even played in and around the fairly large bunker on the edge of the airfield. Until, that is, someone discovered a second entrance to the bunker, and a second level - full of aircraft engines, parts, and about 200 tonnes of WW2 era high explosive in the form of rockets, bombs and other stuff. There were two chambers each about the size of a basket ball court.
In the four years we were there, they discovered previously unknown cellars in three major buildings on base (including the Havel School), and a two mile long tunnel linking the airfield with the Havel river.
All of this on an RAF airbase which covered only a few square miles, and had been active in allied hands since the end of WW2.
There is plenty yet to be discovered in ex-Nazi occupied land, mark my words.
True. I have to say as a Brit visiting Huntsville in Alabama, it was a shock to find that they named the local exhibition centre after the designer of the V rockets that hit London during WW2.
And I was not shocked when I visited the United Kingdom and found that they had built a memorial to Lord Kitchener, a man that was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of South African civilians through neglect born of incompetence, arrogance and mindless prejudice. It seems visiting South African Boers, it seems, regularly go there with the intention of urinating on the memorial. That may shock the sentiments of the average patriotic Briton but the Boers hated both Kitchener and his country with such passion that many of them fought with the Germans during WWI although these days most of them reserve their hatred for Kitchener in particular.
Let me add to your excellent post -- having grown up in Huntsville during the 60's and the peak of von Braun's American fame (not infamy, yet), he serves as an almost perfect corner case for techies to consider as to how they would fit into their larger society to advance their technical dreams. von Braun did not ask to be born into what would become Nazi Germany and when he started working for the army there it was before the Nazi atrocities started. He wasn't particularly interested in weapons and by all accounts his goal was always space flight. The German army resources allowed him to pursue the development of the rockets he had been working on for years before, at that time Germany was not yet the horror it would become. By the time the really bad stuff started happening there -- the deadly slave labor, which his project was involved in, he was stuck -- continue the work or head to prison or execution, most likely the latter by that time in the war; he was arrested in 1944 and released only due to the intervention at the highest levels (Albert Speer, Minister of War Production). Those slave laborers (which he claims to not know the extent of) were doomed from the start; there is nothing he could have done for them. So, just what was he supposed to do? -- given that there was nothing he could have done to improve the lot of the populations under Nazi control? The fact that he was working on weapons aimed at the civil population of England could be problematic but by then the English and American bombers were incinerating German cities. He didn't have the option of just quitting and going away to work on something else. Given the same circumstances what would any of us techies had done? I don't know and I'm glad I will never have to find out. There is an excellent recent bio (2007) of von Braun by Michael Neufeld which tries to address the moral ambiguities of von Braun's life -- worth a read.